Il Douché and His Discontents: The 2016 Primary Voting Thread, Part 4

chances of a president trump getting impeached, whacked or having a stroke seem pretty high compared to most, veep slot has a decent chance of paying off

who woulda thought chris christie had an lbj long game in him, but i guess he's probably worried about his heart

Watching some of this Trump protest in New York. Part of me thinks that anything like this only guarantees him the nomination, generates push-back in any wavering Republicans (why they'd still be wavering, I don't know). But, if you grant Trump even a sliver of a chance in general, anything that previews how exhausting his presidency would be can only be good. You'd have four years of this every day, I would think.

kasich is angling for it no?

he's doing trump a favour by staying in, for a start

Kasich is probably getting strong signals to stay in the race from elements in the party who hate both Trump and Cruz. There is still much confusion among them about how best to play their unexpectedly weak hand.

On Friday night, after Mr. Trump called for a boycott of Ms. Kelly’s show, the network responded through a spokeswoman.

“Donald Trump’s vitriolic attacks against Megyn Kelly and his extreme, sick obsession with her is beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate who wants to occupy the highest office in the land,” said Irena Briganti, a spokeswoman for the network. “Megyn is an exemplary journalist and one of the leading anchors in America — we’re extremely proud of her phenomenal work and continue to fully support her throughout every day of Trump’s endless barrage of crude and sexist verbal assaults. As the mother of three young children, with a successful law career and the second highest rated show in cable news, it’s especially deplorable for her to be repeatedly abused just for doing her job.”

Ms. Kelly, as she had in the past, has stayed out of the crossfire, opting not to respond personally to Mr. Trump’s provocations.

Later Friday night, the Trump campaign responded in a statement from its spokeswoman, Hope Hicks:

“Megyn Kelly is a highly overrated reporter and anchor that constantly disparages Mr. Trump with negative and inaccurate reports. Despite the fact he wants nothing to do with her and will not appear on her show due to her extremely biased reporting, much of the program is about him anyway on a nightly basis.”

“Unlike Megyn Kelly, who resorts to putting out statements via FOX News, Mr. Trump will continue to defend himself against the inordinate amount of unfair and inaccurate coverage he receives on her second-rate show each night.”

ok I did laugh at "second-rate" in response to "second highest rated"

i like when trump obviously writes his own press releases in the third person

"Hope Hicks" is an amazing name

'Despite the fact he wants nothing to do with her and will not appear on her show due to her extremely biased reporting, much of the program is about him anyway on a nightly basis.'

This is such an insane thing for a presidential frontrunner to say.

Republican Leaders Map a Strategy to Derail Donald Trump

Republican leaders adamantly opposed to Donald J. Trump’s candidacy are preparing a 100-day campaign to deny him the presidential nomination, starting with an aggressive battle in Wisconsin’s April 5 primary and extending into the summer, with a delegate-by-delegate lobbying effort that would cast Mr. Trump as a calamitous choice for the general election.

Recognizing that Mr. Trump has seized a formidable advantage in the race, they say that an effort to block him would rely on an array of desperation measures, the political equivalent of guerrilla fighting.

...The names of a few well-known conservatives have been offered up in recent days as potential third-party standard-bearers, and William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, has circulated a memo to a small number of conservative allies detailing the process by which an independent candidate could get on general-election ballots across the country.

Among the recruits under discussion are Tom Coburn, a former Oklahoma senator who has told associates that he would be open to running, and Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who was suggested as a possible third-party candidate at a meeting of conservative activists on Thursday in Washington.

aaaaahahahahahahah

This is such an insane thing for a presidential frontrunner to say.

― Frederik B, Saturday, March 19, 2016 4:20 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah dude, trump's off the wall

http://www.tomsshoesale.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/vans-off-the-wall.jpg

lol. actually i've been thinking about perry's dropping out of the race so early. surely he must be kicking himself after seeing so many other people get their turn in the sun. he's also a complete doofus and probably very susceptible to flattering advice. if these clowns are dedicated enough to actually try to field a third-party "but really, he's the real republican" ticket, perry really might be their man.

will someone rid me of this meddlesome Texan

he dropped out early i forgot he was ever in it, tbh. but didn't he drop out early, in part, because he was totally out of money and his own campaign workers hadn't been paid in weeks? doesn't seem like he had the financial base to stay in for the long haul, even if he might have eventually had a moment in the sun (i kinda doubt he would have, though. other than wearing glasses he was essentially 2012 ver 1.2)

what would they call their new ticket? just "independent" or will they make a catchy name

shd just be the conservative party like most parliamentary systems, ppl will know what theyre getting

i like n.o.p., the new old party

I only skimmed it, but the third-party idea might link to a Huffington Post piece that someone linked to the other day--that the objective would be to make sure neither Trump nor Clinton gets half the electoral votes, after which the election gets thrown into the House of Representatives. I don't know, I'll have to go back and read the full piece. For that to happen, the third-party candidate would have to actually win a handful of states, no?

or really any state, which would not happen

what would they call their new ticket? just "independent" or will they make a catchy name

― Treeship

"functionally illiterate"

Here's the piece again:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-nicholas-phillips/doomsday-savior-how-paul-ryan_b_9474788.html

It just bulldozes its way over the part about winning states.

Maybe, without ever saying so publically, they'd be happy enough ensuring even more so that Trump loses. (Curious as to what the Kristols and Eriksons of the world would honestly prefer: Trump or Clinton?)

perry dropping out so early seems strange in hindsight i guess in part because, okay, he ran out of money, but like, all these other clowns were able to keep that same kind of money pouring in. just weird... i mean clearly he's not very competent at these things but you'd have to figure there would still be some subset of donors either fooled by the glasses or still huffing the fumes of that brief moment in 2011 when democrats quivered at the image of this craggy, plain-spoken texan. like what did jindal have that this guy didn't? in some alternate universe he would be in the kasich seat right now, possibly. the independent goofus conservative party should just be a perry/walker ticket.

perry has plenty of wealthy texans donating, he probably just couldnt take all the mean criticism of ppl calling him dim bc everyone in texas treats him much nicer

I wonder if maybe he discovered belatedly that Jeb!, through GWB, already had most of the wealthy Texans, and Cruz had grabbed the fringier hardcore conservative ones?

good pt, also rick perry is incredibly stupid

#neverforget

Perry’s roof-raising speech Friday, which was festooned with ten-dollar words and an emphasis on state governance as a mechanism for crowd-sourcing solutions, broke through in part because it came in a new package: Perry the collected-but-not-cool thinking man, wearing a muted tie, a bespectacled elder statesman whose long tenure as chief executive of the Lone Star state bestowed wisdom on him while showering prosperity on Texans.

Here’s the visual package in a blowup of the above picture, from Perry’s appearance with National Review’s Jim Geraghty. You can’t see Perry’s sensible shoes, but he’s working a subdued, knees-together posture, modestly leaning in to his interlocutor, fully committed to the pursuit of better solutions.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/372882/rick-perry-intellectual-tim-cavanaugh#comments

This is happening:http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/03/breaking-far-left-protesters-shut-down-highway-leading-to-trump-rally/

http://cdn.hitfix.com/photos/4360200/Tara-Reid-as-Aline-Cedrac-Alone-in-the-Dark.jpg

xp

Check out @pjbreenphotohttps://twitter.com/pjbreenphoto/status/711253419281911808?s=09" class="noborder">

Oops sorry

I wonder where Trump will come to in CA. Kinda looking forward to it.

central park today

https://twitter.com/GideonResnick/status/711234839509377024

I wonder where Trump will come to in CA. Kinda looking forward to it.

― Οὖτις, Saturday, March 19, 2016 5

he'll be a big hit in Berkeley and San Francisco

I cant see him hitting any of the major metro areas w out huge problems. Sooo ... Bakersfield? Fresno? Central valley is so heavily latino he's probably screwed there too...

I can't recall a time when a party's presumptive nominee garnered such big protests prior to the general election even starting

Gilroy

CNN is becoming the Ghosts of Republican Campaigns Past network, as they assemble en masse to denounce Trump.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/03/gop-must-answer-for-what-it-did-to-kansas.html

The rise of Trump has forced many conservatives to reckon with the moral odiousness of Nixon’s Southern Strategy — a blueprint for GOP electoral success that relied on coded appeals to white racial animus. Unfortunately, the fall of Kansas has failed to inspire a similar reckoning with the policies that those ugly advertisements were designed to sell. The GOP front-runner’s praise of mob violence and religious discrimination has spurred much righteous outrage from the National Review. Kansas’s shortened school-years have spurred none.

http://www.vocativ.com/news/296340/donald-trump-handprints/

Henry Kraemer, founder of the Trump Has Tiny Hands PAC (which has since been ordered to change its name) said he is not surprised that the Trump Organization is not forthcoming with proof of the size of Trump’s hands. “This is textbook tiny-handed trickery from Donald Trump,” Kraemer told Vocativ. “Of course he never actually made cement handprints because the weight of the wet cement would have certainly crushed his weak, pathetic mouse fingers. The truly sad thing is that he thought any of us would be deceived by his miniature-ham-fisted pantomime.”

Loooooool

kids u gotta get outta the house on Saturday

wonderful mouse hands

Was marveling earlier tonight at the weirdly in-sync/out-of-sync "Up Like Trump" -- how Rae Sremmurd unintentionally made the political song of 2015 -- and when I watched the video for the first time in ages, this shot in particular got me.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v335/gypsyfrocksbedlam/Screen%20Shot%202016-03-19%20at%207.36.53%20PM_zpsduaawucm.png

I met Kraemer thru a local Bus Project thing some years back here in Portland. I'm quite amused his joke has had this amount of impact

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/03/donald-trumps-bleak-view-of-how-dogs-live.html

I hear that sleepy eyes @chucktodd will be fired like a dog from ratings starved Meet The Press? I can't imagine what is taking so long!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 13, 2015

"like a dog!" sleepy eyes chuck todd thought; it was as though the shame of it must outlive him

Kasich on Meet the Press: vision, consensus, etc., etc., then he gets asked a direct question about Merrick Garland and the Senate, declines to answer, mumbles something about considering him when he gets elected president. After the interview, a clarification from the host: Kasich wants to be clear that he would not consider Garland.

I would think at this point, with about a 0.1% chance of winning, Kashich might just answer the question.